> In 1945, the specific heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that microwaves from an active radar set he was working on started to melt a chocolate bar he had in his pocket.
This is only barely related but when we bought our house the (ancient) gas stove was malfunctioning. I looked up the brand (Modern Maid, I think) and was very surprised to learn they were a subsidiary of Raytheon. The thought of a gas appliance made by a weapons manufacturer was, a little unsettling. Replaced that thing pretty quickly.
No, it was a joke. I only know Raytheon as a weapons / explosives company. Had no idea they had a consumer products arm at some point (unlike GE which at one point owned everything including film studios, which is fairly common knowledge.) Given that we were concerned we had a leaky gas appliance...
Better throw out all your GE, GM, and even Mattel products then. Nearly every major manufacturer does, or has at one time, been involved in weapons manufacture.
So an immediate increase in the efficiency and significantly improved longevity over time... doesn't this basically multiply the panels effectiveness as time goes on? That's incredible this gain could come from caffeine
It looks like about a 13x longevity improvement over the tested timespan, which is absolutely nuts.
It's specific to perovskite solar cells, though, which aren't in commercial use because their lifespans are so short. They're one of the 'holy grail' high-efficiency technologies like magnesium batteries, so a 13x increase in lifespan is at once hugely important and not enough to make them realistic.
TFA doesn't show die-off, though. The graph just shows "after 1300 hours at 85C, still producing at 86% output". The slope doesn't imply a drop right after (but of course who knows).
My assumption was that since the slope looks fairly flat, this was still a nonstarter for most applications - 86% after 2 months is good progress, but commercial standards are 80% after 20 years. Even so, it's a big step up from the material's past of failing outright after short spans.
According to wikipedia, caffeine can be synthesized, but is normally just obtained as a byproduct of decaffeination.
If anything would increase in price, it would be energy drinks and other caffeinated beverages. Price increase would probably be minuscule, as I imagine the demand for solar panels is dwarfed by the demand for soda and energy drinks,.
Maybe, but that is only because synthetic caffeine is currently not very competitive with the free caffeine produced as a by-product of decaf manufacture. The price of existing naturally-derived caffeine (and possibly the coffee from which it is derived) could rise, which is not a pleasant thought.
The article compares caffeine vs. no-caffeine but I'd be interested to see how caffeine compares to other additives. For all we know H2O could do the same thing
FTA:
> UCLA professor Yang Yang’s lab chock-full of coffee drinkers spent several years searching for a stability-enhancing additive to turn famously unstable perovskite PV cells into a useful product. Then, on a lark, Yang's graduate student Rui Wang suggested they try adding caffeine to the mix.
They tested different compounds for years before finding one that works - I don' think it would add much to the article to list every one of them.
The big element missing from the headline: this isn't about improving existing commercial solar cells.
The caffeine improvement is specific to perovskite-based solar cells, rather than commercial-use silicon. Perovskite is expected to reach higher efficiencies than silicon at far lower production costs, but isn't viable because of rapid degradation and problems producing panels at scale. The good news, though, is that caffeine's improvements work on exactly those problems, raising defect-free crystal size and increasing panel longevity while in use. And it's an absolutely massive increase: the lifespan gain is more than an order of magnitude.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 85.9 ms ] threadhttps://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/Take-Sunlig...
Also superconductors...
https://phys.org/news/2011-05-red-wine-clue-superconductive-...
Just imaging what Buckfast would do!
> In 1945, the specific heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that microwaves from an active radar set he was working on started to melt a chocolate bar he had in his pocket.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery
Interestingly there is a rendering of what appears to be a Predator drone on the AMD website:
https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-aero-defense-soluti...
It's specific to perovskite solar cells, though, which aren't in commercial use because their lifespans are so short. They're one of the 'holy grail' high-efficiency technologies like magnesium batteries, so a 13x increase in lifespan is at once hugely important and not enough to make them realistic.
My assumption was that since the slope looks fairly flat, this was still a nonstarter for most applications - 86% after 2 months is good progress, but commercial standards are 80% after 20 years. Even so, it's a big step up from the material's past of failing outright after short spans.
If anything would increase in price, it would be energy drinks and other caffeinated beverages. Price increase would probably be minuscule, as I imagine the demand for solar panels is dwarfed by the demand for soda and energy drinks,.
They tested different compounds for years before finding one that works - I don' think it would add much to the article to list every one of them.
The caffeine improvement is specific to perovskite-based solar cells, rather than commercial-use silicon. Perovskite is expected to reach higher efficiencies than silicon at far lower production costs, but isn't viable because of rapid degradation and problems producing panels at scale. The good news, though, is that caffeine's improvements work on exactly those problems, raising defect-free crystal size and increasing panel longevity while in use. And it's an absolutely massive increase: the lifespan gain is more than an order of magnitude.